Ending Crack Cocaine Addiction

Marco’s Story

man smoking crack

By the time he was 35 years old, Marco had a wife, three children - and an addiction to crack cocaine. His wife was also a crack user.

His addiction would go on for another three years before Marco would finally find a way to beat it. By the time he won the battle, he had been abusing drugs like powder cocaine, crack or alcohol for eighteen years.

He started drinking in high school and didn’t even like it at first. By the time he was a senior in high school, he had fallen into the pattern of drinking after Friday night football games. He’d sneak into his room at night, trying to not alert his parents.

Soon after he graduated, he lifted a tiny bag of cocaine from a friend who was selling it and held onto it for awhile. When he finally tried it, it was not much of a thrill. But here too, he finally got the hang of it after a little while.

Marco’s father was an influential man, and his influence helped Marco get good jobs with good money attached to them. Gradually, Marco’s cocaine use and drinking began to creep up without his realizing it. He began to disappear overnight a few times a month because of his partying and drug use with his friends. “I’d make excuses about where I had been,” he said. “My parents were gullible but at the same time, they knew.”

A little at a time, Marco began to steal small amounts of money from his company so he could buy drugs when he was out of cash. He finally got fired when the discrepancies were found.

His dad helped him find another couple of jobs but the quality of Marco’s production was suffering from his drug abuse. He thought he found his true love but when they broke up, his drug and alcohol abuse got much worse. He was closing bars every night and using cocaine when he needed to be awake and alert.

His body began to break down under the strain of excess weight and substance abuse. Doctors helped him pull through a crisis of pancreatitis, a common problem for heavy alcohol abusers, and he returned to working and drug abuse. He met a woman who shared his taste for drugs and alcohol and they established a relationship in a terrible pattern of working, using his father’s money to buy more drugs and then using copious amounts of cocaine. Because they were living near the Mexican border, the drugs were cheap.

A year and a half later, they had their first child. They agreed to stop abusing drugs in the later part of the pregnancy but a few months after the baby was born, they returned to their habits.

Somehow they managed to cope with taking care of the baby and still abusing drugs, trying to keep those activities separate. Another baby came and the burden got heavier.

An overdose almost killed his wife but that only stopped them for a few weeks. Before long, they had graduated from cocaine to crack cocaine which hit him much harder than power coke ever had. Marco and his wife still tried to separate their drug abuse from their children but were only partly successful. A third baby complicated things even more.

But right here, both of them began to deteriorate quickly and severely. In the middle of a crack cocaine binge in 2006, when his youngest child was six months old, his wife suddenly disappeared. Marco just fell apart.

Marco’s finances began to fall apart, as did his father’s, on whom he often depended for money to buy more drugs. Despite being a drug user, his wife got custody of the children and Marco’s world was further destroyed. There was no longer any hiding his problem from his family.

Finally, his children ended up safely with relatives but Marco continued to deteriorate. His father’s death brought him some cash from the insurance which nearly all went to drugs. In just a couple of months, he was back to being broke.

There finally came a day when he had destroyed everything - the trust and love of his family, his finances, his friends, everything he owned and his self-respect - everything was in shreds. Suddenly, all the illusions shattered and he realized what he had done to himself and his children. Completely desperate, he began to look for help.

Amazingly, glimmers of help began to appear out of nowhere. Friends he had left behind years before began to come forward to help him find Narconon South Texas. At Narconon, he found a way to rebuild that life that drugs had destroyed so thoroughly.

Narconon South Texas drug rehab center

It wasn’t an easy path. But he rebuilt his faith in God while he rebuilt his personal integrity. He started to feel good about what he was doing with his life for the first time in many years. He realized that this program was the only way he could get his life and his kids back and do a much better job of raising them.

The program enabled him to finally forgive himself for the wrong things he had done and he knew he could start moving forward from that point. He graduated from the program soon after but stayed on to help the other students make progress through their recoveries.

He got his children back and began helping Narconon students in recovery. All the destructive habits of the past have been broken. “I know I am not an addict in recovery, I am a recovered addict,” Marco stated. “I know if I just continue to take responsibility for myself and others, I will be fine.”